School Yearbook : The Untold Story of a Cringey Tradition and Its Digital Afterlife

Why school yearbooks-as frivolous and cringey as they are-are far more than just objects of nostalgia. We’re all familiar with the embarrassment that washes over us when recalling our high school yearbooks.Questionable fashion choices, gravity-defying hair, a melodramatic quote-what were we thinking?Even as school yearbooks decline in popularity among contemporary teens, they continue to impact our lives in shocking ways.Collected, digitized, aggregated, and recombined in ways that would have been impossible to imagine just a few decades ago, yearbooks are no longer bound personal archives of adolescent memories.In the twenty-first century, they are shaping our lives in surprising and sometimes disturbing ways. And what could be a more fitting afterlife for these cringey books? In School Yearbook, cultural critic Kate Eichhorn investigates this ubiquitous object.On the surface, school yearbooks are easily dismissed as innocuous collections of embarrassing photographs and cheesy affirma